Mobile Games Roundup

Sync Simple

• Android/iPhone/iPad - Free
• £1.19 for ad-free version (unified binary)

Syncing is the curse of the mobile gamer. Barely a day goes by without that nagging sense that you probably ought to be bloody syncing something, and it's rarely simple. This never happened with console gaming.

Fortunately, Xeronix Works' latest has absolutely nothing to do with syncing whatsoever, despite the name. Instead, most of your efforts are expended trying to cling onto existence as you steer a pixellated ship down a fast-moving, two-tone, three dimensional tunnel.

This isn't any old tunnel though. This one happens to be chock full of equally pixellated hate-filled aliens on a mission to take you down for your petty infractions. And with no control over your speed, or even your weapon, the only course of action is to kill or be killed.

Whether you tap, tilt or slide to dodge the oncoming death, the game boils down to a decision to go left or right. It's not original, there's no depth, and yet somehow you want to prove your worth to Sync Simple over and over again, strange being that you are.

6/10

Burn it All

• Window Phone 7 - £2.49 (free trial available)

No, it's not Burn The Rope again, even though, yes, there are ropes that you have to burn. It turns out that Pastagames/Bulkypix's alternative want us to burn ropes in an entirely different manner to Big Blue Bubble's enjoyable iOS offering.

Rather than tilting the flame to set fire to things, you have to use your finger to steer a little firebug thing onto various ropes. En route, you have to avoid all the various water droplets and air vents lest they temporarily extinguish your fiery monster.

To add to the drama, you're not merely working your way through a series of levels but progressing up a series of floors to a final destination. With a rather strict time limit to battle against, failure to enter the lair at the top floor results in having to take control of another of the family of firebugs.

On the plus side, each subsequent firebug is slightly more capable, and by the time you get to the third and final bug you're so robust that even the patrolling enemies don't bother you.

That said, by the time you're forced to run through the same levels for the third time, you're wondering out loud why you couldn't have been given the more capable member of the family for the first occasion.

This creeping sense of pointlessness rapidly puts a crimp in what might have been an absorbing premise. But left with the withered carrot of higher scores to chase, the incentive to keep replaying the same levels very quickly dries up, and you're left wishing you'd fired up Burn The Rope all along.

5/10